Speaking on Fox’s The Story With Martha MacCallum on Wednesday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro blasted members of the Left, including Democratic senators, for slamming the idea that thoughts and prayers were an appropriate response to the massacre last Sunday in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
MacCallum noted that some critics thought that the words “thoughts and prayers” were politically charged and wrong. She played clips of Democratic senators Christopher Coons and Kirsten Gillibrand and CNN host Don Lemon mocking the idea that thoughts and prayers were a proper response to the tragedy.
Shapiro responded:
I think a lot of the criticism is coming from people who really don’t necessarily disagree with thoughts and prayers, but they think that if you disagree with them politically, your thoughts and prayers must be insincere. So what they really say is that if you vote with them for gun control, then you don’t have to either think or pray, and if you do think and pray and you vote with them then those thoughts and prayers are sincere, but if not, then your thoughts and prayers are just cover for you wanting to do nothing.
This is a dramatic misunderstanding of what thoughts and prayers are for, particularly prayers, what prayer is designed to do. As a religious person, as an Orthodox Jew I pray at least three times a day, and regularly between, after every meal, and the idea of a prayer is not necessarily to change policy. It’s to change yourself; it’s to change your community; it’s to better yourself so that God smiles with more favor upon you and your community. It’s not always supposed to be just fuel in the tank so that you go out and pass a gun control proposal the Left likes.
MacCallum switched gears, speaking of incidents that appeared to be racially-motivated that turned out not to be racially motivated at all. She asked Shapiro to comment. He responded:
In a lot of these cases, what seems to happen is that the first headline that comes out is an allegation is made of something terribly racist that happens at a college. It usually is at a college, an academy, because those are institutions where the administration is particularly sensitive, given all the civil rights laws that apply to public universities. Particularly that they have to respond right away and they have to sound off right away and they have to give credence to the allegations right away.
Now listen, we should take allegations seriously, but we have seen a lot of cases now, it’s not a small number of cases, we’ve seen a lot of cases where people make allegations of a racist slogan that’s been drawn or a racist object that’s been put out in public view, and it turns out that it was put there by somebody who actually promulgated the story, or it turns out that it had nothing to do with racism in the first place. This is why it’s necessary in all of these cases that we actually wait for the evidence to come out before we start condemning universities as racist or all college students as racist.
We’re living in a really, really delicate time where every allegation – no one wants to be seen as taking these things non-seriously; no one wants to be frivolous about this stuff, but that sort of leads to the opposite problem in many cases, where you don’t even wait for the evidence to come out before jumping on it with both feet.
Video below: